Robbie Williams is on to a winner with a mix of originals and cuddly
Christmas-themed covers on Swings Both Ways, says Helen Brown

So here it is then, the soundtrack to this year’s Christmas shopping. Robbie Williams knows he’s onto a winner with his retro swing sound: although 2001’s Swing When You’re Winning contained none of his most famous hits, it’s still the 39-year-old’s best-selling album to date. Twelve years ago, that idiosyncratic approach to the American songbook mobilised his engaging, direct and conversational vocal style to warm and likeable effect. He showed an ability to make easy bedfellows of American-style romance and British camp, and pulled in plenty of celebrity cameos, most memorably Nicole Kidman (who harmonised on Christmasnumber-one single Somethin’ Stupid).

For Swings Both Ways Williams repeats and improves on the formula, with more original material by long-term songwriting partner and producer Guy Chambers, and a significant ramping up of both the cuddliness and the camp. Casting Williams as the nation’s wayward, cheeky Santa, it’s the audio equivalent of a festive shop window display, crammed with winter woolies and naughty underwear, topped off with vintage fairy lights.

The album opens with Shine My Shoes, an original, though instantly recognisable and fairly forgettable, Williams/Chambers collaboration, with lyrical flourishes from Williams’s biographer Chris Heath. Here Williams affably dismisses his critics (“The way you don’t love me/ Kinda makes you look ugly”), before moving on to more personal material with another original song, Go Gentle. A cosy, swaying rhythm sweeps you through the tender, new father’s song of advice (“So when you go dancing with young men down at the disco/ Just keep it simple/ You don’t have to kiss though”).

Then we’re into the first of the jolly, big band duets, as Olly Murs (pale pretender to Williams’s light entertainment crown) lends his laddish stylings to a knowing version of Louis Prima’s Jungle Book hit I Wan’na Be Like You. Later on, Lily Allen adds sweetness to bedtime classic Dream a Little Dream, Kelly Clarkson does cute on Bobby Russell’s Little Green Apples and Michael Bublé adds sparkle to a kitsch original, Soda Pop.

But the star atop this album’s Christmas tree is the title track, co-written and sung with Rufus Wainwright. Amid a snow globe flurry of flutes and White Christmas strings, the pair have enormous fun singing about the urge to get high on “Pop rock and coke/ I’ll blow your sock off/ Teach you how to laugh at daddy’s dirty jokes” before sweeping into a grand chorus: “Everybody swings both ways/ From the butchest of bandits/ The feyest of f------/ And singers with everything they need… Face it, Robbie, you’re a little bit gay.” It’s the kind of direct, funny, slightly subversive truth that a major star would never dare deliver in the United States, and exactly why we love Robbie here.

The album’s kiss-off, No One Likes a Fat Pop Star, is equally British, as the singer who was recently tormented by the tabloids joins an operatic choir to lament the temptations of curry and kebabs, and the paparazzi who’ve made being thin a compulsory requirement to enter the hall of fame. Our boy hasn’t just got Christmas covered, he’s worked in the January diet.